5 Easy Ways to Help Your Emails Reach Their Destination and Get Opened.
If you send out emails--whether it's four hundred or forty--there
are key pitfalls to avoid that could hold up your campaigns, suppress response and lower your profit. Follow these simple guidelines and your response rates will rise.
Here's what you need to do:
1. Prevent complaints: Easy enough. Send out permission-based email only. Unsubscribe thosewho want to be unsubscribed immediately. And never email them again.
2. Get authenticated:Most ISPs (Internet Service Providers--the company that gives you access to the Internet. Could be Charter, AOL or someone local) now require email senders to use some form of authentication to ensure deliverability...think
of it as caller ID for email. If your ISP knows who you are, you're more likely to have your emails delivered.Here are three tools you can use to authenticate your email campaigns.
SPF
SenderID
DomainKeys
3. Conduct Pre-Campaign Creative and Delivery Tests:By testing your campaigns before sending, you can dramatically improve results. Simply select a small group of people (if you have 300 names, select 30 random names) and send them your email before you roll out to the entire list.
4. Keep Your List Clean: In a nutshell, remove bad email address from your list immediately. Bad email addresses could be out of date or inaccurate. Run your file through an email change of address service to ensure you have the most current email addresses for your customers. Then process your file through a list hygiene service to make sure your list is free from common data entry errors that render email
addresses incorrect. Plus, anywhere you ask for an email address, require double entry to help with accuracy. Then, send a welcome email message immediately to any email address you collect and pull the returned address immediately.
5. Monitor, Monitor, Monitor: the more you know about how your campaigns perform, the more likely you are to make the continual improvements that result in high delivery and response rates. Ideally, your monitoring should track:
Number of emails that reach your recipients' inboxes
Number of emails actually opened
Number of emails not delivered and not returned (due to full inboxes,
bad addresses, etc.)
Completed actions (i. e. number of people who requested a free
report)
Email delivery companies like Constant Contact will track these
numbers for you, as well as many others.